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British bishops have made the right to life a priority for Catholics ahead of a general election in which two major political parties have promised to liberalise abortion laws.
A statement from the bishops of England and Wales put the right to life at the top of a list of key issues they want Catholic voters to raise with parliamentary candidates ahead of the December 12 election.
The bishops of Scotland also made abortion and euthanasia their primary concerns in a letter issued to voters on November 19.
Their statements came as the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, in their pre-election manifestoes, promised to reform abortion laws.
Labour has pledged to remove all criminal restrictions from the law, meaning abortion would be available on demand and up to the point of birth, a policy pro-life groups say would create one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world.
The Liberal Democrats have said they would decriminalise abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy and enforce exclusion zones around every abortion clinic to stop pro-life counselling and prayer vigils.
The ruling Conservative Party was silent about abortion in its election manifesto.
Protection
The Scottish bishops said Catholics “should urge candidates to recognise human life from the moment of conception until natural death and to legislate for its protection at every stage, including protecting the unborn child, ensuring that both mother and child are accepted and loved”.
“We should remind our politicians that abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia are, as the Church has consistently taught, always morally unacceptable,” they said. “Decriminalisation of abortion unhappily paves the way toward a legal basis for abortion on demand, for any reason, up to birth, and politicians should be urged to resist it.”
The English and Welsh bishops also asked Catholics to find out how candidates stood on the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia and how they would respond to the needs of people “who are frequently neglected or discarded by society such as people with disabilities, Travellers, older people, those who are homeless, those in prison and those trapped in modern slavery”.
